Decisions Make You - Grasshopper

It’s one of the most transparent secrets that we seem to overlook: decisions make us; we don’t make them.

Oh, yes, our decision pops into our mind and then we announce it. That seems like we consciously decided, but that decision was made below decks well before we raised any flag.

 

It’s the way our nervous system is wired. You get the “go ahead” signal from your body way before your intellect gets the message that you’ve decided.

 

Another way to say this is that our senses decide before we take our decision out for a ride.

 

Wracking your brain to make a decision is counterproductive. You jam your ability to receive a decision from your senses by crowding your mind with endless, back and forth diatribe. The decision can’t get through as long as you’re cooking a mental stew.

 

When you need to decide something, consciously take in all the pertinent information. Let’s call this assembling the building blocks. If the decision doesn’t immediately come to you, it’s time get your intellect out of the way. Occupy it with something else and let the assembly portion of your mind put the pieces together behind the scenes. In the old days, people would say, “Let me sleep on it.”

 

In the past, patience was never my strong suit. So, I would want an instant answer. And when it didn’t appear, I would go on an internal rant trying to force one from my mind. Thankfully, I finally got the gift of awareness that all of my “pro-ing” and “con-ing” wasn’t delivering results. That’s when I discovered that decisions make me. I found out that I could trust my senses to decide, rather than trying to beat them into submission.

 

Collect all the information you can about what you want to decide, then trust that you have a part of you that’s in charge of making decisions. Let that part of you do its work and discover for yourself that your decision makes you.

 

All the best,